VISITORS GO BACK IN TIME as a huge glass elevator takes them to the bottom floor of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. The elevator descends 70 feet, but that doesn’t match the somber sinking feeling those who begin exploring the new building in the shadow of the Washington Monument will likely experience.

Every president has his characteristic sayings. In the near future, “Let me be clear,” “This is not who we are,” and “I have a pen and a phone” will remind us of the administration now ending. Those were all understandable, if not always justifiable, statements; but one favorite phrase has always puzzled me: “the right side of history.” It sounds profound, especially to us history buffs. But what, exactly, does it mean?

Kim Holmes, a former assistant secretary of state and Heritage Foundation vice president, is the author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind.

An ever-dwindling number of Pearl Harbor survivors returned to Hawaii this week to mark the 75th anniversary of the attack that drew the United States into World War II.

Many of those still telling their stories of that horrific day are in their late 90s or older, long past the time when most people are able and willing to travel great distances. But at 103, Jim Downing wouldn’t miss the trip.

“We get together and have a great time and compare our stories,” he said Tuesday from his hotel in Waikiki.

Only five of the 335 men who survived the unprovoked attack that sunk the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941, remain alive. Donald Stratton, 94, is one of them. He has added to the historical knowledge of that day and the beginning of America’s entry into World War II in a new book, All the Gallant Men: The First Memoir By a USS Arizona Survivor.

Typical of so many men of that era, the book (written with Ken Gire) is less about Stratton, a 19-year-old kid from a tiny Nebraska town ravaged by the Great Depression, and more about the men with whom he served.

Ninety-seven-year-old Alfred Marcus once stood 6-feet-1-inch tall, but now he bends over his walker as he makes his way to the elevator of his assisted living home, past a room full of residents playing Bingo. He recently moved from the tiny town of Prinsburg, Minn., just 15 miles away, where he spent his whole life, except the time he spent serving in World War II.

King Hezekiah abhorred the idol worship rampant in Judah. When he began his reign as the nation’s 12th king, Hezekiah “removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah …,” according to the biblical narrative in 2 Kings 18:4.

Now, the Israel Antiquities Authority reports archaeologists have uncovered a city gate-shrine they believe Hezekiah’s men demolished at the city of Lachish in the eighth century B.C.